Q who? —

Google finally lists Nexus Q as not for sale on Google Play

Can you say "sayonara" to something that never really existed?

We've posted update after update on the Nexus Q, waiting for the Android-powered streaming media player to launch. The last we heard of it was back in July 2012. But as of this morning, Google labeled the Nexus Q no longer available for sale on its Google Play page.

The Nexus Q was a streaming media player Google announced at last year's I/O conference in San Francisco. The device streamed content from the cloud and could be used as an amp to power speakers or connect to a TV. The orb-shaped device was also controllable by any Android device running Android 2.3 Gingerbread or higher, and it featured only one control: a nob for turning the volume up or down. The Nexus Q had a built-in 25W amp and was designed by Google to be very hackable. Google said the Q would be manufactured the United States, which explained its $299 price point. The device was then taken back to the drawing board so that Google could refine its features, but not much has been heard about it since then.

It's unclear why the Nexus Q was taken off the virtual store shelves, or what Google's plans are for media streaming in the future. Hopefully we'll hear more from the company come Google I/O time, but until then, prepare to light a candle for the media streamer that never was.

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46 Reader Comments

I never understood the draw or direction of the device, especially at $300, nor the inclusion of an onboard amp. I watched a couple hackers see what they could do with it, and it ultimately didn't really go very far, short of running CM10 or some variant. There are far better (hackable/homebrew) solutions as streaming media players. Hell, even the raspberry pi seems to have a brighter future than the Q does, at almost 1/10 of the price.

Didn't Google offer to ship the device as it existed at launch to everyone who had pre-ordered it before the re-tooling announcement? It was meant to be an olive-branch move, I think. Did anyone ever actually get it? I had forgotten about it but figured a teardown would eventually show up on Ars or wherever once those lucky early adopters had it in their hands.

I've always been impressed with google's willingness to scrap bad ideas after significant investment. Apple, post Jobs, seems to have learned from google's practices as well - so long mobileme. Microsoft... no comment.

cateye wrote:

Didn't Google offer to ship the device as it existed at launch to everyone who had pre-ordered it before the re-tooling announcement? It was meant to be an olive-branch move, I think. Did anyone ever actually get it? I had forgotten about it but figured a teardown would eventually show up on Ars or wherever once those lucky early adopters had it in their hands.

Strange indeed.

There were development versions that could only be ordered at google IO. I'm not sure if they ever shipped.

The Nexus Q is a perfect allegory for many misguided Google products, created not because they should but because they can. It's this lack of focus and lack of attention to detail that is preventing Google from rising to the forefront as the defacto choice in many categories.

Didn't Google offer to ship the device as it existed at launch to everyone who had pre-ordered it before the re-tooling announcement? It was meant to be an olive-branch move, I think. Did anyone ever actually get it? I had forgotten about it but figured a teardown would eventually show up on Ars or wherever once those lucky early adopters had it in their hands.

Strange indeed.

I pre-ordered and received one at no cost. It was fun for about the first week. Haven't done much with it since.

Didn't Google offer to ship the device as it existed at launch to everyone who had pre-ordered it before the re-tooling announcement? It was meant to be an olive-branch move, I think. Did anyone ever actually get it? I had forgotten about it but figured a teardown would eventually show up on Ars or wherever once those lucky early adopters had it in their hands.

Strange indeed.

I pre-ordered and received one at no cost. It was fun for about the first week. Haven't done much with it since.

I've always been impressed with google's willingness to scrap bad ideas after significant investment. Apple, post Jobs, seems to have learned from google's practices as well - so long mobileme. Microsoft... no comment..

You are incorrect. Mobile Me was killed when Steve Jobs was still boss.

I never understood the draw or direction of the device, especially at $300, nor the inclusion of an onboard amp. I watched a couple hackers see what they could do with it, and it ultimately didn't really go very far, short of running CM10 or some variant. There are far better (hackable/homebrew) solutions as streaming media players. Hell, even the raspberry pi seems to have a brighter future than the Q does, at almost 1/10 of the price.

The Q was way too expensive, but there should be a space for a headless Android box that can connect to a stereo and a source of digital music, like a USB drive or network share. Logitech's Squeezebox line was something like this, but has been discontinued as well, and the prices are through the roof.

The Nexus Q is a perfect allegory for many misguided Google products, created not because they should but because they can. It's this lack of focus and lack of attention to detail that is preventing Google from rising to the forefront as the defacto choice in many categories.

Perhaps we should be thankful for that.

Exactly. Good post. I don't think it is in Google's DNA to have an Apple like focus. I think it will eventually be their undoing. After all, they are essentially an ad company with a search engine.

Didn't Google offer to ship the device as it existed at launch to everyone who had pre-ordered it before the re-tooling announcement? It was meant to be an olive-branch move, I think. Did anyone ever actually get it? I had forgotten about it but figured a teardown would eventually show up on Ars or wherever once those lucky early adopters had it in their hands.

Strange indeed.

I pre-ordered and received one at no cost. It was fun for about the first week. Haven't done much with it since.

I never understood the draw or direction of the device, especially at $300, nor the inclusion of an onboard amp. I watched a couple hackers see what they could do with it, and it ultimately didn't really go very far, short of running CM10 or some variant. There are far better (hackable/homebrew) solutions as streaming media players. Hell, even the raspberry pi seems to have a brighter future than the Q does, at almost 1/10 of the price.

The Q was way too expensive, but there should be a space for a headless Android box that can connect to a stereo and a source of digital music, like a USB drive or network share. Logitech's Squeezebox line was something like this, but has been discontinued as well, and the prices are through the roof.

Android or a linux setup, as mentioned the rpi could do this,but you would likely want an amp that has an hdmi input for thw audio. Also the software to integrate devices. Google music android app has option for q I believe last I checked but no other streaming support, shoutcast, dlna/upnp, squeeze box. It'd be cool if google released a client for q as open source, so we can build our own q and have integration with our devices.

Didn't Google offer to ship the device as it existed at launch to everyone who had pre-ordered it before the re-tooling announcement? It was meant to be an olive-branch move, I think. Did anyone ever actually get it? I had forgotten about it but figured a teardown would eventually show up on Ars or wherever once those lucky early adopters had it in their hands.

Strange indeed.

I pre-ordered and received one at no cost. It was fun for about the first week. Haven't done much with it since.

Look at it this way: You are in possession of a very rare object.

One ring to rule them all?

No, yours is like the rings given to the kings. There's a master Q hidden somewhere in Google's HQ.

Didn't Google offer to ship the device as it existed at launch to everyone who had pre-ordered it before the re-tooling announcement? It was meant to be an olive-branch move, I think. Did anyone ever actually get it? I had forgotten about it but figured a teardown would eventually show up on Ars or wherever once those lucky early adopters had it in their hands.

Strange indeed.

I pre-ordered and received one at no cost. It was fun for about the first week. Haven't done much with it since.

Look at it this way: You are in possession of a very rare object.

There are about 10k of them and they are easily found for dirt cheap on ebay

"It's unclear why the Nexus Q was taken off the virtual store shelves"

Unclear?

That a POS product priced 3x above the competition doesn't sell and is almost immediately taken if the "shelves" is anything but unclear. This is a product that never should have seen the light of day.

Sure, you can buy a "decent" amp for $50 these days, but all of the really good sounding ones cost a lot more than that (the amp/speakers on my desk cost me thousands of dollars, and I bought them secondhand. I hope to still be using them 30 years from now).

Once you get used to audio that actually sounds good, you can't put up with anything less. $50 is exactly $50 more than I am willing to spend on crap.

This wouldn't be the first time someone has tried to sell a good quality product only to be discontinued because nobody will pay for quality sound anymore. $300 isn't that much for gods sake.

Samsung makes pretty good money, but it's not "the big profits" by any sane measure of the word.

Samsung only looks good when you compare them to companies that could file for bankruptcy any day now. The truth is they don't make much money at all when you look at how many units they sell. They're profitable, but not remarkably so.

Its unfair to say it cost 300 because it was made in the US--that's either supposition or an excuse. It cost that much because it was a poorly thought-out product and Google was winging it.

It was the hardware version of Wave, and typical of the engineering-style arrogance that graces much of what Google does. I get the feel that someone high-up thought it was cool and no one had the gumption to say otherwise.

What a debacle! Imagine the press headlines if this product would have been produced by Apple. But just because it's Google, no somethingGate or whatever else.

So Google- introduces the Nexus Q (and yes Google was serious to sell this thing), and tries to convince us that this the cutting edge in anything, THE Google 2012 designed hardware, - is incredible hypocrite by claiming that it's made in US, - a few days after every review out says that it's crap, is again stupid hypocrite by saying that it's delaying the thing because it wants to improve it, - and now finally and quietly cancels the entire thing because it realized that the crap is totally flawed.

Now, just like Wave and many other unsuccessful products (say for example Chrome OS and Google+), the Nexus Q just shows how Google is unable to create and ship working and successful consumer products which are not a copy of someone else product but something original to Google. Android is a stolen product from the iPhone and its success (associated with the infamous Samsung practices in ripping off the iPhone and stealing Apple's IP) has really nothing to do with Google ability to create a successful product.

I've always been impressed with google's willingness to scrap bad ideas after significant investment. Apple, post Jobs, seems to have learned from google's practices as well - so long mobileme. Microsoft... no comment.

I agree that it was pretty expensive for what it was, even if the included amp was good, but when you're competing with the likes of Roku and AppleTV, $300 is difficult to swallow for most people (just as abhi_beckert said, nobody wants to pay for quality audio anymore).

However, I think Google was onto something with the Nexus Q UI. That is, its lack of UI. Getting rid of remotes altogether and using a tablet as one was a stroke of genius: why bother interacting with a clumsy 10-foot UI when you have a perfectly functional tablet UI at your fingertips? You may argue that a tablet is an additional expense but who doesn't have a tablet these days? Besides, I'm sure you could make a perfectly workable tablet for that purpose for less than $100.

I also think that Wave was amazing, but its awfully slow implementation and its lack of interaction with standard email were the causes that made it a failure for most poeple. By simplifying it a little bit (making non-linear editing optional, using a tweaked version of the Gmail UI instead of that 3-pane atrocity) and by making a bot (or whatever the proper term is/was) that could parse email into a wave so that Wave users could still communicate with standard email users, it could have been a very solid product.

There were development versions that could only be ordered at google IO. I'm not sure if they ever shipped.

Everyone at Google IO got one in their goodie bag. I know because I was there.

I have mine in the kitchen where it replaced an old Squeezebox and amp setup as listening setup. But it has some pretty big, and strange, limitations. If it was possible to stream via bluetooth to it that would make it a lot more useful. Or even better if it had support for DLNA "play on" and similar stuff.

As it is it only supports streaming from Google Music so that makes it kind of a chore to put stuff on it. Personally I like to listen to podcasts in the kitchen, but manually uploading them to my music account just to stream them is more effort than it's worth.

I really like the design of the device though. If they could add a laser projection display it would be awesome. (As it is, it has a bunch of LEDs around the middle which light up to give a light show.while playing. Pretty, but not very useful.)

I've always been impressed with google's willingness to scrap bad ideas after significant investment. Apple, post Jobs, seems to have learned from google's practices as well - so long mobileme. Microsoft... no comment..

You are incorrect. Mobile Me was killed when Steve Jobs was still boss.

It's perhaps a bit misleading to say MobileMe was 'killed' at all, since iCloud uses the same IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV infrastructure for Mail/Notes/Calendar/Contacts sync. Even the web apps are clearly evolutions of the MobileMe ones (at iCloud's launch, they were nearly identical). I think Apple are quite wary of repeatedly throwing out their tech, perhaps influenced by their damaging attempts to completely rewrite their OS in the '90s with Pink, then Taligent, then Copland.

I've always been impressed with google's willingness to scrap bad ideas after significant investment. Apple, post Jobs, seems to have learned from google's practices as well - so long mobileme. Microsoft... no comment.

This is something which Apple learned before Google even existed and it's not like they were the first company to do it either.

Now, just like Wave and many other unsuccessful products (say for example Chrome OS and Google+), the Nexus Q just shows how Google is unable to create and ship working and successful consumer products which are not a copy of someone else product but something original to Google. Android is a stolen product from the iPhone and its success (associated with the infamous Samsung practices in ripping off the iPhone and stealing Apple's IP) has really nothing to do with Google ability to create a successful product.

I don't think this is fair. Google can create successful end-user products, but they often lack the attention-to-detail and sheer will to follow through.

They give an impression similar to a number of other companies where the engineering and development people call the shots and are unchecked by marketing, finance, legal and/or design. They make a lot of really good and interesting ideas, but ignore or dismiss outright flaws because they're making the product for themselves, rather than for the general audience.

Wave was almost impossible to explain to someone---it was neat, but it was a real challenge to explain what it was for, and you could tell that if you weren't on Google's campus it was pokey as all-hell. It was a VIP's baby. The Q was similar: someone very high-up was really in love with it (you could tell be the build quality) but it was too expensive (another mark of a Special Snowflake) and, like Wave, you're challenged to explain what it might be for.

Google spins off a lot of products like this, and a lot of them are unrefined because they're little more than engineering playthings. This is okay when it's something that won't see much use, or is a trial balloon (Shopper, Health), but it's a problem when it's something that sucks a lot of capital or sees a lot of public scrutiny (Buzz, Wave, the Q): not only are the products often fundamentally flawed, the sponsor is so arrogant that they'll disregard constructive criticism of their baby. The other problem is that Google tends to orphan projects when the sponsor looses interest: some otherwise good products end up rotting on the vine and people dependent on (Picasa seems to be going this way, as is Grand Central/Voice)

This is very different than Jobs'-Second-Coming-era Apple, who is ruled by design and marketing: they make products that are mercilessly finished because they're always thinking about how customers would use them. Jobs, to his credit, was very good at that, and he had only a few notable Google-eqsue egotastical failures (the G4 Cube, which I have, comes to mind).

It's important to keep in mind that Google is an advertising company. Almost everything else that they do exists either to support that, or is funded by that. Making stuff is a side-project, and it's only when that stuff enhances the advertising side of the business that it gets the kind of polish it really needs (search, GMail, later versions of Android, YouTube)

I pre-ordered and received one at no cost. It was fun for about the first week. Haven't done much with it since.

Look at it this way: You are in possession of a very rare object.

An Apple I sold for $375k last year. That's a pretty hefty example of the 'Apple tax' (in terms of historical significance the Altair 8800 is far more important) and I doubt a Google device would ever command similar prestige. But it's definitely worth keeping for the next 40 years, especially if you have the box.

Didn't Google offer to ship the device as it existed at launch to everyone who had pre-ordered it before the re-tooling announcement? It was meant to be an olive-branch move, I think. Did anyone ever actually get it? I had forgotten about it but figured a teardown would eventually show up on Ars or wherever once those lucky early adopters had it in their hands.

Strange indeed.

I pre-ordered and received one at no cost. It was fun for about the first week. Haven't done much with it since.

Look at it this way: You are in possession of a very rare object.

There are about 10k of them and they are easily found for dirt cheap on ebay

I can see 5 on eBay right now. The price ranges from $170 to $227. I wouldn’t call that dirt cheap. But I would agree that it doesn't seem to be especially rare.It doesn’t look like the price has changed too much either. Looking through recent completed auctions most were selling for ~$175.